Today, subjection to a ruthless capitalist framework seems almost natural. In his 2006 book The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, Jacob S. Hacker describes a “new contract” that formed between companies and employees in the absence of regulation from the government in the 1970s and ’80s: The essence of the new contract was the idea that workers should be constantly pitted against what economists call the “spot market” for labor—the amount that they could command at a particular moment given particular skills and the particular contours of the
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